application season

Med school applications are the sort of thing that can take over your life, financially, emotionally, and otherwise. Especially when you're like me: not quite a shoe-in, lingering at the cusp of being competitive. It's hard not to psychoanalyze, to spend time thinking about how to game the system. Even worse, my default mode of late has been to be super hard on myself. How can I not think, as I write my fourteenth essay trying to convince a nameless stranger what an excellent physician I'll make, how much easier this would be if I had just gotten one or two more questions right on the MCAT? But, alas, it's just not a productive train of thought.

Anyways. I am trying to push through them. I sent in my first complete application yesterday to my first choice school. Today I am trying to get five more out the door. By the end of the weekend, I hope to have all 16 or so finished. At about $130 a pop, it's going to be an expensive few days. And it's going to be an even longer eight or so months waiting to hear back.

I may not get in anywhere, given my cusp-like stats, which is a tough reality after all the time, effort, and expense I've endured in the last two years. Not to mention the, uh, lack of a solid backup plan. J. likes to remind me that I'm doing something really, really hard, especially for an English major, and it helps me to put perspective on it. Organic chemistry is hard, and I did it! So these committees can have my 99th percentile verbal score, they can shake their heads at my marginal physical sciences score, and they will take it or leave it. I don't portend to be a physics genius, but I'll be a great doctor, and hopefully they'll see that somewhere in the delgues of paper they get from me in the next few days.